Repetition as Practice

OCTOPUS WOMAN PORTRAIT (Art by Hallelujah Truth)

My art practice is a daily repetitive act.  

This morning, I'm contemplating the value of repetition in my daily creative practice. It is all too easy to dismiss repetition as an act of a dullard.  To repeat implies to "copy," and copying implies a lack of novelty--the ability to "create" something new.

I imagine that my "repetitive acts of art" serve the greater need I have to release judgment each morning as I sit down to draw and paint.

NOT GOOD.
NOT BAD.
JUST IS.

In another way, my exercise of beginning my morning drawing with the familiar, with what I know, is a "spiritual" practice. My first steps follow a well worn path. I walk. I dance. I linger. 

The visual images I create and repeat are internal experiences. I "see" them emerge in and out from a haze, something like the way messages appear in the children's toy Crazy 8-Ball.

OCTOPUS WOMAN 1. (Art by Hallelujah Truth)

These images are collections of real world experiences synthesized with my imagination over time. For example, I offer you the image of  my beloved Australian Aboriginal Creation God, Wandjina, which is part of my "Cosmos of Hallelujah." As I have drawn him repeatedly over the past 10 years or more, Wandjina and I have developed a relationship. His presence in one of my drawings has symbolic meaning for me, which only repetitive drawing could have forged.

Now, I am inviting new symbols to emerge in my cosmos. I introduce OCTOPUS WOMAN. This "Octopus Woman" results from my real world viewing of octopi over time in various media, aquariums, and on the coast; the repeated drawing of Mother Mystery (a woman in a hijab) which is a part of my Cosmos like Wandjina; and Cynthia Winton-Henry's offering of the octopus as a symbol offering wisdom.

OCTOPUS WOMAN 2 (Art by Hallelujah Truth)

Without the repetitive act of drawing over time, I would be without my cosmos, without a way to "track" the spirit of my creative life. 

That's Coffee with Hallelujah. I'm curious. Do make "repetitive acts of art"? What are they? What do you learn from them?

OCTOPUS WOMAN 3. These numbers are arbitrary. The variations of Octopus Woman here are a result of the App Paintbrush. This morning I used a micron pen to outline the pencil drawing that I watercolored yesterday. and posted in this blog: Intuitive Feast. (Art by Hallelujah Truth)

ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Thank you Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones for this statement for the release of judgment: NOT GOOD. NOT BAD. JUST IS. As frequently as I use this proclamation, I must acknowledge it did not originate with me.